Transitions
He was cut out for it. For surviving, that is, which was funny as hell to both of us since he claimed that all he wanted was to die and all I wanted was to live another day. He was a real savage when it came to fighting, I certainly never beat him, and he had a good sense of street smarts. There was more though, little weird things that just helped him out in huge ways. He was just sort of lucky. For example, he had this unusual knack for fishing. There was a slow, murky river that ran parallel to the blight a few miles south from the town that we spent the majority of our time together at. There were a number of moments in my life at that point where time really slowed down, where I could feel just how much the gods wanted me dead. None of them compared to what happened to me at that river though towards the end of our first year of friendship. It was summer again, but the weather was nicer. Not cooler, but at least there was a breeze. It was also a point in the town's history before the soldiers really started to give up on our territory- there were still enough cheap whores around to keep them coming back to die, so the general atmosphere wasn't awful. It didn't feel like our numbers dwindled every day, it didn't feel like we sat on the brink of destruction. What's more, Illiv actually brightened up my family's little home a lot. He was such a serious, weird guy that no one could really take him seriously. He just scowled and whined about how much he loved death all the time while my little sisters hugged him and smothered him in love. More importantly though, he'd bring absurdly large offerings of river trout to my aunt and uncle to gain their favor, and as it turns out, people are less angry when they're less hungry. So we sat like we normally did on two large rocks that rested just a little way into the river. We'd sit on those rocks, cast out our lines, and just relax and talk away our days. It was really nice. We were having a nice time, just talking. He was catching fish after fish while I just sat there with my thumb up my ass and pretended to help. I remember at one point I made the mistake of asking just which of the seven he had to sacrifice his parents to to be able to catch fish like he did. He replied "They're like men, that's why I catch them so well. Just dumber. They want to die, and they know that Unquala chose me to be her shepherd. Think about it- all men want to die. All the races of the earth want to die. They crave it and they love it. They make wars, they sabotage themselves, and they ruin their lives all as tribute to death. They're begging for it." "Oh. So tell me about all the wars that these fish must have underwater while we aren't looking, then, because that sounds like a really interesting story." He smiled one of his rare smiles. Those things were powerful, by the way. It was hard not to be just a little happier when someone as dreary as him gave a smile. Even if they did usually come right before he said something awful and disheartening. "The fish are more honest than us. Look around. The more intelligent a man is, the more likely he is to lie. No men want to admit they want to die. They're ashamed of it, they think it's a bad thing. These fish though? There's not a second of doubt in their mind. They just want to make as many baby fish as they can and to die. Really the only reason they make baby fish is to let them die, too." "Illiv, I don't want to die. I want to fucking live. Death is scary. I think you really underestimate it. You never watched your parents die. You never saw their half eaten, rotten corpses. You never smelled the stench of your mother's rotting bosom. You think death is some romantic, peaceful thing? It's not. It's hideous and monstrous." The whole time I spoke he pulled and struggled with a fish at the end of his line. He pulled in another fish, this one was really massive, half as tall as we were. It had gotten snagged on the eye by the hook, and if it had put its toothy wide jaws on Illiv's line I had no doubt that it would've snapped it and ended our fishing early. No such thing though, because Illiv was lucky. Blessed. He beat the fish over the head with a club and sloshed over to the shore where he laid it next to our pile. We could have gone home then, but we were arguing and had to sit and fish until our argument was complete. Any other course of action was out of the question. "You just say that because you're the smartest guy I know. I have no doubt that death will really struggle to take you in, Zed. There's no reason that death can't be peaceful. They say that when all life has stilled that Unquala will feel a peace and joy unlike any other known in time before her. You have to stop thinking, and just exist." "Well, the nice thing about thinking, other than the fact that it keeps you alive, is that the more thinking you do, the more thinking you do. Thinking is a self perpetuating thing, Illiv. You'll never win this argument because the more you argue with me the harder I'll have to think and the less I'll ever want to die. With enough knowledge, I'll find a way to cheat death. I don't care what the cost is, either, because I hate death more than anything." Also, nothing was worse than being wrong to Illiv. He'd just sit there smugly for the rest of the day, knowing that he'd cut down another happy little piece of grass. Gods, those words were so stupid. I might as well have looked up to the heavens and screamed "Seven! Strike me down!" "Well, Zed, maybe you're just looking at things wrong. Knowledge is one of the only things that's really immortal. That's why it's sacred. Like the wisdom I impart on you every day. Someday, when I die, it will live on in you. Then, you'll teach it to someone else before you die. Unquala loves knowledge, that's why she lets it cheat her. Knowledge and thinking are two different things though. Thinking will just block your head up and fill you with fear and shame. Just be. Besides," He gave me a bastard's grin, knowing that he'd won. "One might say that you will to die through your desire to be friends with a man who is slowly breaking down the barrier of lies that you hold in front of yourself." That day I learned that the exact time that it took for a god to hear a blasphemer’s cry and to pick a punishment was the exact amount of time that it took for Illiv’s meticulous, cool voice to let that slight handful of words slither out from his black painted lips. The moment he said “yourself,” a cold wind blew in from the east, heralding one of the wretched children of Rhivic, slithering through the river. Of course a cloud had just passed overhead, casting its shadow at just the perfect time to make us hesitate when a certain spot of heavier darkness appeared upstream of us, heading down. In a safer town, with two men whose destinies were not so heavily tied with fate as Illiv or I, it might have just been the shadow of a tree hanging over the river. This was not the case. It was the shadow of something moving from the deeper water towards the shallows where we stood. A head burst from the water, not far from where we sat. Large protruding eyes sat far back on a long, wrinkled, jutting chin that bore massive gaping lips, adorned with rows upon rows of tiny teeth. My whole world began to slow down as the creature shot forth its own mouth from its head like toothy javelin towards Illiv. Dark bluish brown skin exploded outward, and the flying mouth stretched half again the length of a man’s body to latch onto Illiv’s left arm, nearly engulfing it entirely. From the silhouette the creature left in the water, the remained of its body lay coiled under the murky surface, lurking like a leviathan eel. The whole event seemed to happen in slow motion, and strangely enough, in almost complete silence. I dropped my pole, leaping off of my rock and sloshing through to water to Illiv. There was no time for thinking. He already had the wicked long dagger that he used for his rituals in his right hand, and was flailing desperately to stab the creature in the membrane that connected its jaws to the rest of its face. I hurled myself forward and grabbed onto his foot, pulling on him to pull myself closer to the beast. He grunted in pain as our brief tug of war was ended by the creature snaking its entire body back into the deeper area of the water, pulling Illiv and I with it. Water crashed around me, filling my ears and blinding me, but I held onto Illiv, pulling myself closer to where I imagined the creature’s head would still be. I felt smooth, slimy, muscular flesh wrap itself around my leg just as my hand felt a hold on one of the bony lips latched onto Illiv’s shoulder. As I swung my dagger wildly around underwater I felt that same smooth, slimy skin coiling around my body from every conceivable angel. I slashed and struggled, my feet unable to find purchase on any ground, for what felt like a short lifetime. Eventually, I was able to kick my way to the surface, to take a massive gulp of precious air, and to continue stabbing and hacking at the Forsaken monster’s ropy flesh. Only after I could no longer feel any traces of its wiry flesh upon my skin did my mind find footing to process the scene around me. The water was black and red, and smelled like shit and rot. Illiv was floating face down, moving slowly downstream from me. I rushed towards him, feeling a strange drag as I did, and gulped and gasped and struggled him back to shore. He was bleeding profusely, and his blood was slick on my hands and arms. I lay him down on the sand and to my relief he rolled to his side and coughed and coughed. His entire left side appeared to be painted in blood. I cut through what remained of the shirt to see a massive, shredded, circular wound around his armpit and shoulder. I ignored his coughing moaning fit as I gently inspected the wound. It appeared to be shallow, but as large as it was I was terrified that he might bleed to death. I ripped off my own shirt and pants to try to make a tight bandage for his complicated wound. When I was tying them off, leaning over him though, something white and stringy entered my field of vision as it fell upon his makeshift bandage. Glancing down upon my naked body I could see no less than half a dozen small white, wormlike creatures all latched onto my chest and legs. I saw that the largest one, nearly twice as long as my hand, was slowly wiggling his head deeper and deeper inside me. I began to cry. I could feel nothing as it squirmed, nothing but a sudden overwhelming sense of hopelessness, a despair and futility that made my limbs feel numb and useless. I turned my back to Illiv, whose breathing sounded shallow but normal, and did my best to stifle my sobbing as I cut the creatures out of me. My hands shook with pain, nausea, and fear as I had to dig deep into my flesh to pull the heads of the small parasites out of the holes they had dug into me. Behind me, Illiv quietly said “I’ve bled worse than this just for fun…I tell you, Zed, sometimes I worry the gods are getting lazy.” That was my first real encounter with death. It hung around for a while, casting a shadow over my eyes that darkened the world I saw. As Illiv had pointed out before, much of my cynicism was really just my way of hiding from other more substantial emotions. For the first time in my life, that lightheartedness really wasn’t enough. I began to break down and withdraw. I had seen something when that beast violated our river. It was that everyone I cared about were all going to die. Ripped to ribbons by those ravenous abominations. There was no standing up to those monsters, and the blight creeping from Rhivic only grew every day. For as long as I could recall we planted man after man into the graves of our town, hoping that from their bodies would grow some miracle to save us all. I had learned then that there would be no such thing. We were damned.